Stylos is the blog of Jeff Riddle, a Reformed Baptist Pastor in North Garden, Virginia. The title "Stylos" is the Greek word for pillar. In 1 Timothy 3:15 Paul urges his readers to consider "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar (stylos) and ground of the truth."

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Eusebius, EH.1.7: Harmonizing the Genealogies of Matthew and Luke

Image: This chart represents the view espoused by Eusebius, drawing on Africanus, for harmonizing the genealogies of Matthew (left) and Luke (right).

A new installment from Eusebius of Caesarea’s The
Ecclesiastical History has been posted: book 1, chapter 7 (Listen here).

Notes and Commentary:

This chapter is an attempt by Eusebius to harmonize the
genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3. He cites as a source a letter from Julius Africanus
to Aristides on the harmony of the genealogies of the Gospels.

Among the major differences in the two genealogies is the
fact that Matthew traces the line through David’s son Solomon and ends, “And
Jacob begat Joseph” (Matt 1:16a); meanwhile, Luke traces the line through
David’s son Nathan and begins by noting that Jesus was supposed to be “the son
of Joseph, which was the son of Heli”
(Luke 3:23). How could Joseph be the son of both Jacob (Matt) and Heli (Luke)?

Eusebius argues that “neither Gospel misstates, reckoning
both nature and law.” He adds, “both accounts are strictly true … in a manner
complicated but accurate.”

Lake explains in a footnote:

“The point of this obscure argument is that among the Jews if
a man died childless his brother was charged with the duty of begetting
children of the widow, who was still reckoned as the wife of the deceased. Such
children were legally regarded as the sons of the dead brother, though known to
be actually the children of the living one. This happened in the case of
Joseph. He was legally the son of Eli [Heli], physically of Jacob. A further
complication was that Eli and Jacob were only half brothers. They were the sons
of the same mother, Estha, but Eli was the son of her second husband, Melchi,
descended from Nathan the son of David, and Jacob was the son of her first
husband Mattan, descended from Solomon the son of David. Thus, Matthew giving
the physical descent of Jesus traces it through Jacob to Solomon, but Luke (who
avoids the word ‘begat’) giving the legal descent traces it through Eli to
Nathan” (n. 2, pp. 56-57).

I agree with Lake that this explanation is “obscure.” A
simpler harmonization would be to say that Matthew provides the legal line
through Joseph, a descendent of David through Solomon, and Luke, the natural
line through Mary, also a descendent of David but through Nathan, thus making
Heli the father of Mary not Joseph in Luke 3:23.

Eusebius also makes reference to traditions handed down “by
the human relatives of the Savior,” that Herod the Great had attempted to
obscure.

He again, puts forward the idea that Herod the Great was not
a Jew. He suggests that Herod the Great’s father Antipater had been taken
captive by the Idumaeans from the temple of Apollo, where his father, a certain
Herod, was a priest. Antipater was later befriended by Hyrcanus, priest of
Judea. Then, when Antipater died, his son Herod the Great was made king of the
Jews by the Romans.

Herod the Great had tried to burn family records to hide his
origins but private records were preserved, again by the family of Jesus, which
tell the true story of his descent.

Finally, Eusebius adds that the Jewish practice requiring
tribes to marry among their own also argues for Mary as from the tribe of
Judah.

This analysis provides an excellent example of early
Christian pre-critical analysis of Scripture, which seeks to harmonize the
canonical Gospels and assumes them to be historically reliable.